Five Facts About Fried Chicken

When cooked properly, fried chicken is perhaps the most lip smacking meal of all time. Crispy, juicy and downright delicious, it is on the top of everyone’s list of junk food and biting into a crisp and flavourful shell that paves way to tender, soft chicken inside is one of life’s biggest pleasures.
The dish has experienced a renaissance of sorts, what will it moving from the humble plates in shacks to the menus of restaurants all over the world. KFC is perhaps the pioneer of popular fried chicken today and is a food brand that is loved globally.
In this article we have proceeded to strip down fried chicken and educate you on some facts about your favourite junk food.

1: FRIED CHICKEN WAS INVENTED BY THE SCOTTISH:
Fried chicken originated in Scotland. The Scottish are the ones who came up with the idea of deep frying chicken in fat, while everyone else boiled, baked or grilled it. They then proceeded to introduce the same in America. However, which it was Scottish immigrants who brought fried chicken to the US, it is the African immigrants that worked on plantations there that added various spices and seasonings to the recipe and improved it.

2: BEFORE THE SECOND WORLD WAR, IT WAS AN OCCASION DISH:
Because of the long preparation time required, the scarcity of chicken meat and need for such a large amount of fat, fried chicken was generally reserved for special occasions. Ironic considering today it falls under the category of ‘fast food’. It is however, only much later that fried chicken came to be found on restaurant menus and earned itself this reputation.

3: SLAVERY AND SEGREGATION PLAYED A ROLE IN ITS POPULARITY:
Slaves were allowed to own and raise chickens and it was common to fry them up during special occasions. However, after a lot of restaurants started to not allow blacks, it became common place to fry chicken and it became their staple diet.

4: THE PRESSURE COOKER WAS THE SECRET TO KFC’S SUCCESS:
Colonel Harland Sanders was adamant that his fried chicken be pan fried but was also unhappy about the method consuming too much time and hence he purchased one of the first ever pressure cookers and converted the same into a pressure fryer only to find that the resulting chicken was just as delicious as it would have been if pan fried.

5: THERE ARE VARIANTS OF FRIED CHICKEN ALL OVER THE WORLD:While originally associated with America, Fried chicken in fact has variants all over the world. For instance in Korea, it is fried twice and then dunked in some sweet and spicy sauce. In Thailand, it is given a good marinade and served with sticky rice and in Senegal it is coated with a peanut flavour.